In the hard brightness of that winter day
The sea was frozen solid and Hans heard,
By his drift-fire, on the shore, the difference
Between loud water and loud wind, between that
Which has no accurate syllables and that
Which cries so blau and cries again, so lind
Und so lau, between sound without meaning and
　　　speech,
Of clay and wattles made as it ascends
And hear it as it falls in the deep heart's core.
A steamer lay near him, foundered in the ice.

So blau, so blau...Hans listened by the fire.
New stars that were a foot across came out
And shone. And a small cabin build there.
So lind. The wind blazed as they sang. So lau.
The great ship, Balayne, lay frozen in the sea.
The one-foot stars were couriers of its death
To the wild limits of its habitation.
These were not tepid stars of torpid places.
But bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces,
They looked back at Hans' look with a savage faces.
The wet weed sputtered, the fire died down, the cold
Was like a sleep. The sea was a sea he dreamed.
Yet Hans lay wide awake. And live alone.
In the bee-loud glade. Lights on the steamer moved.
Men would be starting at dawn to walk ashore.
They would be afraid of the sun: what it might be,
Afraid of the country angels of those skies,
The finned flutterings and gaspings of the ice,
As if whatever in water strove to speak
Broken dialect in a break of memory.

The sun might rise and it might not and if
It rose, ashen and red and yellow, each.
Opaque, in orange circlet, nearer than it
Had ever been before, no longer known,
No more that which most of all brings back the known,
But that which destroys it completely by this light.
For that, or a motion not in the astronomies,
Beyond to the habit of sense, anarchic shape
Afire-- it might and it might not in that.
Gothic blue, speed home its portents to their ends.

It might become a wheel spoked red and white.
In alternate stripes converging at a point
Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below,
Just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross,
Through weltering illuminations, humps
Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.
It might come bearing, out of chaos, kin
Smeared, smoked, and drunken of thin potencies,
Lashing at images in the atmosphere,
Ringed round and barred, with eyes held in their.
　　hands,
And capable of incapably evil thought:
Slight gestures that could rend, the palpable ice,
Or melt Arcturus to ingots dropping drops,
Or spill night out in brilliant vanishings,
Whirlpools of darkness in whirlwinds of light...
The miff-maff-muff of water, the vocables
Of the wind, the glassily-sparkling particles
Of the mind -- They would soon climb down the side of.
　　　the ship.
They would march single file, with electric lamps, alert
For a tidal undulation underneath.